With a focus on providing new growth opportunities for the media and publishing enterprise, IT organizations are responding to an increased demand for new and improved web content management (WCM) features. Concurrently, organizations are also faced with an imperative to reduce the cost of deploying, customization, and servicing WCM solutions.
A conventional web content management solution comprises a browser-based content entry application and a browser-based content web site. The browser based content entry application allows content producers (within or outside a company) to define, create, and maintain content. This community of users performs functions comprising collaborating with peers, sending content through an approval workflow, assigning metadata tags to the content, and deploying the content to other parts of the organization through XML or other sharing methods.
The browser-based content web site allows consumers who interact with the content delivered over the Internet to, for example, find, view, e-mail, rank, print, and comment on particular articles of interests. Consumers in this context comprise external users, customers, partners, suppliers, and employees. This community requires access to information of interest or information needed to perform any required task regardless of the source of that information. This audience is a target for the content management system.
The browser-based content web site delivers content (e.g., news articles, product support information, etc.) by retrieving items from a database, formatting the retrieved items with HTML tags, and presenting the formatted items to a browser of the user.
Although conventional web content management solutions have proven to be useful, it would be desirable to present additional improvements. Challenges associated with the browser-based content entry application comprise development cost of the browser-based entry application, a learning curve of a user of the browser-based content entry application, and applicability of the browser-based content entry application.
Most content entry applications require customization because each customer desires a customized look-and-feel that matches, for example, the business objectives of the customer. For example, an on-line newspaper wants reporters to deliver timely news articles to subscription-paying readers while a computer support site wants to deliver the most relevant trouble-shooting articles on a product. These very different requirements lengthen the time needed to design, implement, and deploy the browser-based content entry application, thus driving up the cost of development.
Most content entry applications such as the web-based content entry application require training of the end users. Content entry applications incorporate functionality comprising, for example, content entry templates, version control, metadata tagging, workflow, and search. Designing intuitive information architecture around these functions is a challenge. Many content entry applications are too complicated for end users to use without training, making it difficult to roll out across the entire enterprise.
Web-based content entry applications are not always practical. For reporters writing news-stories in Iraq during fighting, logging onto the Internet and pulling up the Web pages to enter content is not feasible.
An alternative content entry interface is required to speed up the delivery of timely content in a cost-effective manner for users and developers that does not require extensive training for users. What is therefore needed is a system, a computer program product, and an associated method for importing content into a content management system using an e-mail application. The need for such a solution has heretofore remained unsatisfied.